Contracts
Use Company Information → Contracts to view your company’s contracts. GMs prepare offers and assign them; players accept eligible offers.
Between contracts, use Campaign → Contract polls to vote on GM-prepared offers before normal company acceptance. See Choosing the next contract by poll for deadlines and eligibility.
Check destination, length, scale, command terms, support and salvage before accepting. Acceptance may post the configured payments; review the result before submitting another action.
For a narrative contract, choose a suitable campaign track. Missions played and contract months are separate settings.
Negotiate individual contract terms
Open Company Information → Contracts and choose Negotiate contract on an assigned new offer. The shared offer is the baseline for every company. A saved negotiation affects only your company; it never overwrites the offer or another player’s terms.
Choose accepted company scale from a numeric dropdown containing only 1 through the maximum supported by current ready BV, or PV in Alpha Strike. If equipment changes make a previously saved scale unsupported, it is shown disabled until you choose a supported value. The server rechecks the limit when saving and accepting. The displayed maximum uses the two-thirds force requirement, not an arbitrary typed scale or a GM offer cap. Crippled and destroyed units do not count. The selected contract roster must also satisfy unit-count and value limits. Your reputation comes from the company ledger; its negotiation allowance is the smaller of nonnegative reputation and twice accepted scale. Reputation is not deducted.
Select final steps for base pay, salvage rights, transport coverage, support rights and command rights. The campaign’s base rules profile chooses the table: Hinterlands second printing pp. 19–20 or Draconis Reach pp. 27–28. Their pay and support tables differ.
A trade gives up two table steps in one term for one increase elsewhere, at most twice. For example, Independent command at step 11 to House command at step 7 gives up four steps and funds two increases elsewhere. Two separate one-step decreases cannot be pooled. Extra decreases cannot fund more than two increases; trades never bypass the per-term scale limit. The form shows each decreasing term and its potential trades.
Only printed table entries can be selected. Gaps still count: Liaison at step 8 to Independent at step 11 costs three steps. Draconis Reach limits each term's total positive change to accepted scale, including reputation and trades. At Scale 3, base pay starting at step 7 (100%) can reach step 10 (130%), not step 17. Step numbers are positions in the term table, not company scales. Hinterlands does not state this additional per-term cap. Live choices and the budget use the same server calculation as saving; invalid choices are unavailable. Without JavaScript, the server still rejects invalid submissions and preserves entered values.
Piracy and known printed non-negotiable template terms stay fixed. The GM can also mark terms fixed while preparing baseline offers. Custom values or special salvage terms that do not map exactly to the selected book table remain unchanged; no rounding or invented steps are applied. Contract type, duration, destination and special conditions remain fixed.
Save negotiated terms updates the negotiation in place without charging money. Choose Review saved terms and roster to open acceptance; without JavaScript, saving opens that review directly. Acceptance rechecks baseline, current reputation, rules profile, saved scale and current ready force. An understrength selected force is rejected before any contract, transport charge or reputation change is recorded. Revise terms or scale returns to negotiation. Accepted contracts retain the baseline, final terms, steps and reputation allowance; negotiated uncovered transport is charged once.
You may prepare a negotiation while another contract is active, but must finish that contract before accepting. Existing-contract backfill offers keep their earlier workflow and do not replay negotiation or payments.
Money and past activity
Use Company Information → Warchest for the transaction ledger. Review descriptions, dates and amounts when reconciling the balance.
Use Contracts to inspect earlier contracts and Company Information → Mission reports or Company tracks for related mission activity. Imported history and the ledger preserve the recorded transactions.
Company Information → Import CSV opens the same destination-based CSV workflow as Campaign → Import CSV. Balance correction and Injury correction are separate GM pages and do not offer another importer.
Standard combat pay is No pay 0, Unsuccessful 250, Success 500 or All objectives 750 SP per submitted scale. Choose the applicable outcome in the shared payment workflow; Aces adaptations and exercises do not introduce a separate pay scale.
Initial opposition and GM surprises
Choose Initial opposition from the RAT faction dropdown when preparing a contract. Players see that faction on the contract and in briefing context.
Later opposition defaults to Same as initial opposition. To plan a change, select a later RAT faction and a change date within the contract. The later faction, date and timeline notes are visible only to the GM; keep surprises out of the public contract briefing.
New OpFor generation uses initial opposition before the change date and later opposition from that date, with the mission year. Existing saved forces are preserved. Use Mission opposition to override the faction for a particular mission. This selects the force-generation faction; it does not automatically stage a three-sided battle or reveal a surprise.
Opposition choices use the contract destination and date: factions with inhabited territory within 150 light-years, plus active pirates, mercenaries and ComStar. Faction start/end years exclude out-of-era choices. Later opposition uses the planned change date. Changing destination or dates refreshes the dropdowns; an unavailable selection must be replaced before saving. This proximity filter is a practical campaign aid, not a rulebook restriction. Unknown destinations offer no factions until a known planet is chosen.
Unscheduled date defaults
Unscheduled optional dates leave the month unselected and suggest the current campaign year. A saved historical date retains its recorded month and year.